UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Previously Published Works Title A responsibility to protest? The public, the Powers and the Armenians in the era of Abdülhamit II Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5rz4k69x Journal Journal of Genocide Research, 17(3) ISSN 1462-3528 Author Anderson, Margaret Lavinia Publication Date 2015-07-03 DOI 10.1080/14623528.2015.1062281 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California This article was downloaded by: [University of California, Berkeley] On: 30 July 2015, At: 09:14 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: 5 Howick Place, London, SW1P 1WG Journal of Genocide Research Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjgr20 A responsibility to protest? The public, the Powers and the Armenians in the era of Abdülhamit II Margaret Lavinia Anderson Published online: 30 Jul 2015. Click for updates To cite this article: Margaret Lavinia Anderson (2015) A responsibility to protest? The public, the Powers and the Armenians in the era of Abdülhamit II, Journal of Genocide Research, 17:3, 259-283 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2015.1062281 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. 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The public, the Powers and the Armenians in the era of Abdu¨lhamit II MARGARET LAVINIA ANDERSON The famous trial of the Kurdish chieftain Musa Bey, whose crimes and acquittal in 1889 embodied for many the insecurities and inequities faced daily by Armenians in eastern Anatolia, opened a period of crisis between the Armenian population and the Ottoman Muslim majority, one culminating in massacres over the next decade that took some 200,000 lives. Contrary to those who believe that Armenians were victims of Great Power diplomacy, or that Western public outrage, by encouraging Armenian militants to provoke massacres in hopes of intervention, was at least co-responsible for the horrors, the article argues that the massacres were an outgrowth of Abdu¨lhamit’s insecurities, driven by a deepening crisis of Ottoman legitimacy and identity, and spurred in part by previous reforms proclaiming civic equality. The interactions between public opinion, European diplomacy and the Ottomans, as well as comparisons from across the Atlantic, reveal real dilemmas of humanitarian conscience too often ignored by works such as Samantha Power’s influential ‘A problem from hell’. Some problems, they suggest, are beyond intervention. Introduction On 27 August 1889, the Daily News published a letter from William E. Gladstone, former Liberal prime minister and now leader of the opposition, under the head- line ‘The Turkish cruelties in Armenia’. The News had recently carried several atrocity reports, and Gladstone wanted to remind readers that ‘we are entitled Downloaded by [University of California, Berkeley] at 09:14 30 July 2015 by Treaty to demand from the Sultan the suppression of all such outrages and the condign punishment of the miscreants concerned’. Gladstone’s more impor- tant point, however, was not a legal one: ‘It has not yet been forgotten that The Daily News was mainly instrumental in bringing to light thirteen years ago the atrocities in Bulgaria, which had for their result the destruction of Turkish rule in that province’.1 Forgotten it was not, least of all by the Ottomans, nor was Gladstone’s own role in that debacle. His 1876 pamphlet, Bulgarian Horrors, had given anti-Ottoman interventionism its battle cry, calling on the states of Europe to ‘obtain the extinc- tion of the Turkish executive power in Bulgaria. Let the Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible manner, namely by carrying off themselves. # 2015 Taylor & Francis MARGARET LAVINIA ANDERSON Their Zaptiehs and their Mudirs, their Bimbashis and their Yuzbachis, their Kai- makams and their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage’.2 And now here was the Grand Old Man again, demanding that his government ‘freely avail themselves ... of the power of public opinion in the cause of humanity and justice’.3 As a tool of humanitarian goals, Gladstone’s confidence in the power of public opinion has retained its popularity on into the present. In 2003 Samantha Power won a Pulitzer Prize by making that case, albeit negatively: ethnic cleansing and genocides are stopped, she averred, only when large constituencies demand intervention. Unfortunately, however, vulnerable peoples are too often sacrificed by bystanders following their perceived national interest.4 The Ottoman Arme- nians provide her Exhibit A. The narrative of vulnerable peoples sacrificed to the national interests of outsi- ders is a popular one, and perhaps nowhere more so than in studies of the Arme- nian question, where Turks and Armenians have agreed at least on one thing: that Ottoman Armenians were ‘victims of Great Power diplomacy’.5 The problem for humanitarians, and for vulnerable peoples, is that only states have power. The problem for states, great and small, is that they have important interests that are not necessarily reinforcing. In what follows I will examine a moment when the kinds of constituencies for intervention that both Gladstone and Power demanded did form—on behalf of Ottoman Armenians. I begin with a famous trial in 1889 that may have been an unnoticed turning point in European awareness of the oppression of Armenians, and perhaps in Sultan Abdu¨lhamit II’s own view of his Armenian subjects. I will then move on to the massacres of the mid 1890s, paying attention to what we might call the anti-Gladstone position, articulated by some contemporaries and influentially by one of America’s most distinguished historians. The thrust of my argument is pessimistic. Armenians could not thrive without significant reforms, especially in the administration of justice. But demanding such reforms in any conspicuous way put their communities in danger. And Europe’s efforts to encourage reform, or even to halt the massacres that ensued, demonstrate the real limits of coercive diplomacy. Downloaded by [University of California, Berkeley] at 09:14 30 July 2015 The bandit Musa Bey In fact, Britain’s prime minister, the Marquis of Salisbury, had anticipated Glad- stone’s complaint. Following interpellations in May and June in both houses of parliament, and another by Gladstone in August, the government had that very month published a blue book, containing the correspondence of its consular offi- cials in eastern Anatolia and between its ambassador to Constantinople and London. This wasn’t the first blue book revealing the ‘conditions of the popu- lations in Asiatic Turkey’, nor would it be the last. Nine more were published over the next eight years. The correspondence provided opinion-makers with a window onto the eastern reaches of the sultan’s domains. The landscape that window revealed was grim.6 260 A RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTEST? The problems confronting Anatolian Armenians were varied and long-standing, as earlier blue books, travellers’ reports and the petitions of Armenians testified. Chief among them were the depredations of Kurdish tribes, who were allowed to have things pretty much their own way. In a scandal in 1889, however, they were embodied in a single figure, the handsome young Kurdish chieftain, Musa Bey, a poster boy for what was wrong in Turkey’s anarchic East. In addition to traditional sheep-stealing, caravan-jacking and bride-snatching in villages on the Mus¸ plain, Musa Bey’s merry men had taken to female dress in order to enter unprotected villages and rape the women.7 A few villages with weapons fought back, but the Kurd could bring other resources to bear. He had purchased the tax farm for the district, thus making himself useful to the Porte (which other- wise might have collected no revenues at all) while acquiring the legal authority to extract taxes from the same people his raids had rendered incapable of paying. In the manner of a Colombian drug cartel, his bands controlled the roads between Mus¸ and Bitlis, preventing farmers from taking their grain to the mills and bring- ing business to a standstill. When an Armenian complained to civil authorities, he was roasted to death, and a young bride was boiled, her grandfather slain and her village sacked—or so it was said; boiling may have been an exaggeration. But the British consul was convinced that Musa Bey had burned a protester alive ‘with his own hand’.